Just a little observation: The corporate sponsor for this contest is Zend which pushes its Zend platform in PHP. Now, if I'm developing a platform, then I'd go with the language that provided the greatest number of resources. For instance, I checked the PHP repositories: PEAR has a total of 412 packages in its repository; PECL has 154. CPAN has 10,642. Hmmm... I rest my case.